Canadian singer-songwriter Barzin came to my conscious completely at random and has suddenly filled it nearly entirely. His most recent album, this year’s Notes To An Absent Lover, is a soft, subtle and gorgeous study in how to transmute loveloss into tender art.
Barzin: Look What Love Has Turned Us Into
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Notes To An Absent Lover works in a way that many similar albums simply can’t, in that you can splinter sections off of it and they function as equally powerful, albeit quiet, testaments to the album’s beauty as it would taken as a whole. “Look What Love Has Turned Us Into” is obviously a personal statement, but it could’ve been written with hands shaking or calm, from a distance or in the center of the storm as two people drift apart. Barzin’s sheer lyrical skill, incredibly emotive voice and simple instrumentation (initially seeming to be nothing that couldn’t be found at a coffeehouse and then, with headphones on, revealing to be layers upon layers of texture) all work to keep the album meaningful without ever resorting to trite emo-territory. Heartstrings are plucked and pulled here, but never broken. It’s because of that intelligence, through that simple logic (there are never any “oh my god please come home” sentiments here, though an intelligent listener such as yourself can read between the lines), that these songs are made all the deeper.
For gray days and plaintive moments, this is just a stunningly beautiful record.
